Time to cut my losses blogging today and save my energy for tomorrow. Some days you just don’t have what it takes to be even remotely interesting or informative. Before I sign off, however, I can’t resist this issue about online games and the sagging economy.

Some statistics and a theory:

Tudou cofounder and mastermind behind the Chinese online game site game.com.cn (we wonder how much he paid for that domain name!) Marc van der Chijs seems to think so:

This week we were analyzing the traffic figures on our Chinese online game sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com, when we noted a strange effect. During weekdays there was hardly any growth on our portals, but on weekends the growth was similar to what we were used to. We looked a bit deeper into this and may have found a reason for this: staff in companies play less online games during working hours (normally we see a spike in traffic around 11:30 AM and from 4 PM onwards).

Why? Likely people are getting more afraid of the effects of the crisis and focus more on their work in order not to run the risk of being laid off. The effect started somewhere around November but seems to be getting more pronounced. I did not do any statistical analysis (and also do not plan to do this), but it seems like an indicator that some Chinese are changing their online behavior because of the crisis.

This is interesting. Let’s see what happens after Spring Festival, though. I don’t know about everyone else, but this time of year is often busy wrapping up administrative stuff. This happens whether the economy is good or bad. I was a lot busier last year, in fact, as I had more client work to do in addition to all the admin.

Perhaps a lot of folks have less to do, but since they are so scared of getting laid off, they are less likely to screw around at work and play games?